Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
To further improve the usability of Windows Phone, Microsoft developed a new
design language, called Modern Style UI, to create a new user interface and set min-
imum requirements for the hardware the new services run on.
To get to the widest audience and target the emerging Asian markets (China in
primis), in 2012, Microsoft released an update to its OS, known as Tango, which
lowered the requirements for devices to run Windows Phone, allowing the new OS
to effectively run on lower-end hardware.
On February 2011, at a press event in London, Microsoft and Nokia CEOs an-
nounced a partnership between the two colossi for Windows Phone to become the
primary operating system for Nokia smartphones, thus declaring Windows Phone as
the third competitor in the smartphones OS market against Android and iOS.
The first Nokia phone models to run Windows Phone are the Lumia 800 and the Lu-
mia 710.
By the end of 2012, Microsoft released the latest edition of its mobile platform, Win-
dows Phone 8, that replaces the previous CE-based architecture with one based on
the Windows NT kernel and several shared components with the new Windows 8
(developed for PCs and tablets), allowing applications to be easily ported between
these two platforms.
As we said, Windows Phone features a new user interface named Modern Style UI.
The main innovation of the new UI consists in Live Tiles that are displayed on the so-
called Start Screen. Tiles are links to apps (contacts, web pages, and media items)
that dynamically update their icons in real time, for example, showing the number of
unread messages for an e-mail account or live updates for a weather app.
Another innovation is the organization of features into Hubs that allow content integ-
ration with popular social networks, such as Facebook, Windows Live, and Twitter,
so that, for example, the Pictures hub shows photos made with the camera equipped
on the phone. From the Hub, users can directly comment and like updates on their
favorite social networks.
The main Hub for the interests of this topic is, obviously, the Widows Phone Store!
